A couple of days ago I posted a short survey. This was to use as some anecdotal evidence in a paper for my class on the Doctrine of Revelation. The paper is focused around skeptic David Hume's arguments against miracles occurring, based on the probability of the miracle occuring and the probability that the testimonies given are false. Lots of people have argued about it and the arguments often get into logic and math debates. I argued that people don't think like that at all, so it doesn't matter. This was well-supported by the survey responses I got; mathematical incoherence, misunderstood questions, and difficulty in assigning probabilities were exactly what I wanted :-) If anyone's interested in this more, feel free to email me for a copy of my paper, or whatever. Hume's Abject Failure by Earman was one of my main sources.
I need some participants in an informal survery. Please send me an email with answers to these questions (consider each one seperately):
Thanks!!! I'll follow this up later with an explanation of what I'm trying to achieve.
Halloween was fun. I was a giant leprechaun. There will be pictures :-) Might take a while though, because I didn't use my digital camera. It's been borked for about 9 months and just last week I sent it to the factory to get repaired.
Our landlords threw quite a party. They had a big old mansion on Madison that they had bought and hadn't fixed up yet. They decked it out with all the good haunted house stuff and food and drinks. They invited all their tenants and all their friends, so there were probably 100 people there, but we didn't know any. If we had it would've been quite the party, but instead we left after about 10 minutes.
Nick finished his classes (culinary at GCC) and has moved out, leaving just me, Kyle, and Chris for the last month
ooh they were good this year
I told lots of people that Cherith and I were engaged and were going to get married next summer. Brian flipped out, Anna was really excited and even called her mom & my sister, others were generally congratulatory. It was fun to see their initial reactions and their reactions after telling them it was a joke. Everybody fell for it.
Of course this prank wouldn't work on Cherith and I had to get her with something. So I told her I found a job in Calif and got accepted and would start there instead of school next year. I planned ahead (company, line of work, what about college, etc) so it all went flawlessly. She took it hook, line and sinker. I went along with it long enough to get all the facts out, but not much longer because that would involve relationship status issues which wouldn't be too fun to get into unnecessarily. So then I told her it was an april fool's joke. Ooh was she mad. What a punk I am :-) she believed it the whole way along. ah ha ha
i am so good. best april fool's day ever
Geology field trip. Lake Michigan. saturday. afternoon. Frozen ice. big. cool. the pictures are worth a thousand words and i'm not so good with words today
if your car gets stuck and you kill the engine, don't forget to put the car in park. true, it's not going anywhere, but your keys aren't either if you leave it in park. thank God for random strangers who can help you figure these things out. and for nearby friends who will help shovel and push you out.
Followup to this blog and more rambling
Chimes, the calvin newspaper, ran an article on CSX BookConnection website today. I emailed them the story idea. the article was quite good in my opinion. should raise awareness of this neat-o service we've got. Along with the 100 or so posters that me and Eric and Jason put up last night. And the student-news email that went out the day before. So far we've got 286 users this month and we have 510 books for sale and about 100 sold.
I'm also working on making ice skates and i think they'll work and calvin has a wood shop and metal shop i can use to make them streamlined so turning is possible.
and the same Eric and Jason who volunteered to help put up posters have volunteered to help get a on-campus tv guide working. i had one last year and people still want it. even just today my girlfriend's roommate wanted me to fix it. having help should make this possible. i still have to get the backend working, they're going to work on the php frontend.
i had 84 (non-spam) emails to read this morning. arg.
Kyle and AJ and I are meeting next week to discuss the future of FamilySite. A re-write using smarty instead of phphtmllib is the key focus. Also design issues so that GEDCOM will be supported well and communication features that Kyle wants can be included.
my girlfriend is awesome
looking into housing for next year... definitely won't be living in the same house. 1 guy moved out already. 2 more after the lease is up. Chris and I are going to look at my friend Andy's house on monday. Not sure what Big Chris will do; likely live on his own. Andy's a cool guy. It'd be nice to live there I think.
haven't gotten started doing PocketPC programming research for CSI yet. i better do that tomorrow when I'm going to be home without the car all day anyway. And work on my Intrusion Detection project with Snort.
Likely will watch Escanaba in da Moonlight tonight. It's been a long time since I saw it in theaters but quite hilarious if i recall correctly.
Went to Mongolian BBQ for lunch today (well, i'd call it breakfast since it was my first meal of the day). Never been there before, but it lived up to my expectations. Return visits are necessary.
So far I've got 68 people on my list of invitees for my birthday party. That's a lot. But it's going to be awesome, especially if everyone comes. That means you! Seriously. You are my friend. More details (meaning, I'll 'officially' invite you) forthcoming.